"It will be when all these things will come upon you - the blessing and the curse, which I have set before you - and you will take it to your heart, among all the nations to which HaShem your God has exiled you: you will return unto

Wordsworth, while touring through Europe, chanced upon a Jewish family in St. Goar. He was moved to write a poem.

HaShem your God, and you will listen to His voice, in all that I command you today - you and your children - with all your heart and all your soul. Then HaShem your God will return your captives, and will have compassion on you; He will once again ingather you from all the nations, to whom HaShem your God scattered you. Though your exiles be at the ends of the heavens - from there HaShem your God will ingather you, and from there He will take you. And HaShem your God will bring you to the land that your fathers inherited, and you will inherit it; He will benefit you and increase you more than your fathers." (Deuteronomy 30:1-5)


Writing in 1878, Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch introduced the foregoing passage (commentary on verse 1): "Now follows the great goal to which the whole sequence of the dark centuries of Jewish sufferings, so full of trials, will ultimately lead." This comment echoes what the Ramban had written more than 600 years earlier (commentary on verse 1): "I have already mentioned earlier that this section speaks of the future, because all the events that it speaks of have never happened; but they will yet happen in the future."


Could anyone possibly have foreseen that God would one day fulfil His promise here? Anyone, that is, other than someone who either had such complete faith in God as to be able to totally ignore reality, or someone so insane as to be totally divorced from reality.


In 1828, the English poet William Wordsworth, while touring through Europe, chanced upon a Jewish family in St. Goar. He was moved to write a poem describing them. After waxing lyrical about their beauty and innocence, uncorrupted by poverty and persecution, he concluded with the words:
"Mysterious safeguard, that in spite / Of poverty and wrong / Doth here preserve a living light / From Hebrew fountains sprung / That gives this ragged group to cast / About the dell a gleam / Of Palestine, of glory past / And proud Jerusalem." Clearly, Palestine, Jerusalem, glory - all was in the past, mere memories of what once was, and was never more to be restored.


And 30 years later, as recently as 1858, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used the Jewish cemetery in Newport, Rhode Island, to symbolise the Jewish nation: "How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves / Close by the street of this fair seaport town / Silent beside the never-silent waves / At rest in all this moving up and down."


And after recalling the past glories of the Jews, he finished by eulogizing them: "But ah! What once has been shall be no more! / The groaning earth in travail and in pain / Brings forth its races, but does not restore / And the dead nations never rise again.".


Indeed. "Dead nations never rise again," but Am Yisrael Chai - the Nation of Israel lives! No one could have

Sixty years ago, in the year 5708 (1948 in the civil calendar), Israel once again became independent on its own Land.

foreseen that less than a century after Longfellow wrote these words, this "dead" nation would rise again.


"Though your exiles be at the ends of the heavens" - meaning, "as far as possible from the Land of Israel" (Ibn Ezra) - "from there, HaShem your God will ingather you, and from there He will take you."


I don't know how much to read into the following observation, so I will merely record it, and let each reader decide for him- or herself how meaningful it really is.


Sixty years ago, in the year 5708 (1948 in the civil calendar), Israel once again became independent on its own Land. And the verse that promises this most directly and unequivocally is: "And HaShem your God will bring you to the Land that your fathers inherited, and you will inherit it; He will benefit you and increase you more than your fathers." (Deuteronomy 30:5) Which just happens to be the 5,708th verse of the Torah.


It goes further. Nineteen years after independence came the Six Day War, in the year 5727 (1967). And the 5,727th verse in the Torah? "And HaShem will do to them [the nations who occupied Israel] as He did to Sihon and to Og, kings of the Amorite, and to their land, which He destroyed." (Deuteronomy 31:4)